[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 04 : Prieto-Nanez and Pérez-Bustos

[Hamilton, Kevin]

March on empyre : Engineering the University


WEEK FOUR :
Transnationalism, Translation, and Global Research

GUESTS:

Fabian Prieto-Nanez
Doctoral candidate, Institute for Communications Research
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Tania Pérez-Bustos
Professor in Anthropology
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota

Today we start our final week of a month of conversations about changing
shape of academic labor in research settings. Each week, one of the grad
students in our Seeing Systems (http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/) cohort
here at Illinois will lead a conversation with a scholar whose work and
path lends some possible examples, models or theories to reflective
engagement or critique of existing academic structures.

Our leader this week will be Fabian Prieto-Nanez. Fabian began his studies
in at home in Colombia, where he studied history and later communication,
following a path of work that led through the design of databases for
historical and archaeological research, critical examination of global
adoption of the One Laptop Per Child project, and research into the
history of engineering and computer education at Universidad de Los Andes
in Colombia. His interests here at Illinois have turned even harder toward
design studies, with an eye towards both critique and practice. Fabian is
also a HASTAC scholar this year.

Fabian invited as a guest Tania Pérez-Bustos, an STS scholar whose work on
feminist epistemologies and practices of science might be most recently
familiar to empyre through her inclusion in last year's excellent
anthology on STS in Latin America, "Beyond Imported Magic" (MIT), or even
her contributions to 2011's Mobility Shifts event at the New School, where
a number of familiar empyre folks presented (and I think even brought that
conversation to the list, if I recall correctly.) Tania brings to this
month's conversation deep experience with the ethnographic study of the
politics of labor, with an emphasis on gender and North-South dynamics,
case studies across the socio-economic spectra, and field experience
across the Global South. In addition to her voluminous publication record
she has also served as editor of the journal Universitas Humanística.

I want to welcome Fabian and Tania to empyre, and thank them deeply for
being willing to lead us this week. I hope all will continue to jump in.
If the discussion so far has highlighted the line between those within the
university and without, it has also reminded us, with the help of other
contributors, that the situation of research labor is a global concern,
with vastly different, if interconnected, implications.

THE HANDOFF TO FABIAN:

Fabian, thanks to you and others in our group, we've returned regularly in
our own discussions at Illinois to postcolonial critiques of knowledge and
institutions. In a similar way that Julia and and Rhiannon brought our
attention to the construction of standards, you have often reminded me of
the role of language and translation in our work to make the most of the
institutions we support, study, or critique. What conversations or
subjects within this month's topic led you to think of Tania's work, and
what would you like to ask her in that light?

-- Kevin Hamilton